Case studies

The Integrated Home Installation: Part 1 - What's In It For The Consumer? (8/6/2004)

By Jonathan Margolis

The penthouse apartment by the Thames must be one of the most spectacular in London. A temple of cool steel and glass on the 18th and 19th floors of a new block, it has 360degree views - and a custom installation by Ipswich-based CEDIA member "The Edge", commensurate with the flat's £3.75m price tag.

Penthouse living room

The apartment is a prime example of the advantages that accrue when installing fully integrated home intelligence from scratch in a brand new property. The entire installation cost a fraction of the selling price, and is bound to add far more to the property's value.

So what will the new owner have at his or her fingertips?

Pretty much everything, really, as the phrase 'integrated home' suggests. The system incorporates lighting, heating and cooling, 20 zones of electrically controlled blinds, access control interfaced with the phone system, eight audio zones, fully distributed video and TV, including four security cameras, fully distributed telephone and data and a remote call facility which makes it possible to operate all of the above from any remote location. As for any problems with the heating and cooling system, these are diagnosed remotely through a separate cellular phone connection independent of the main phone lines.

And yet for all this technology, the only thing the owners interact with is a handful of keypads and neatly flush-mounted wall touch-screen control panels.

Home automation touchscreen

The most important of these, in the hall, is a 9-inch colour screen hidden behind a panel. Running along a pink menu on the left, all the options are clearly stated - lighting, climate, audio, blinds, cameras and exit. The lighting, for example, is admirably clear, giving a choice of five lighting 'scenes' that have been set up by the designer. Each scene then has a dim up and down control. There's also, for the impatient, a simple 'all on' option, which turns on every light in the house.

It looks, nevertheless, like the kind of home you could only usefully live in after undergoing an intensive training course. But, as Kevin Moore of The Edge insists: 'Although I don't think you could learn it all in a single day, you wouldn't need to, because it's a matter of exploring the system and being adventurous with it. If you go to the screens, everything is pretty self-explanatory.'

'The installation is,' he adds, 'fully future proofed as well. The owners haven't asked us for this yet, but if they want, they can very easily have their own Web page where they can see everything happening and adjust whatever they like accordingly.'

Although every inch of wiring is concealed, it is possible to do almost anything anywhere in the house.

Multiroom audio touchscreen

Care to watch a DVD from any one of the four bedrooms? No problem. Feel a sudden desire to listen to Kate Bush while you're in the kitchen? Whistle up the central hard disk player from a convenient wall panel, select Kate from myriad available artists and a list of individual tracks instantly appears on the screen. Care to catch up with a bit of work on a laptop? You can pick up the broadband connection from any of 16 points throughout the flat. Decide the sun is a little too strong for your liking? With one command, you can close every blind in the house - or select the individual rooms that could do with being a bit less bright. There are 50 separate blind motors in the installation. And - of course - you can stop and blind when, like Jack and Jill going up the hill, they are neither up nor down.

The master bedroom, which faces east down the river towards the Houses of Parliament and the Millennium Wheel, is one of the most spectacular in the apartment. It is also practically an apartment in itself, with a bedroom, a mezzanine and a bathroom all under its 20-foot high ceiling.

Penthouse bedroom

'This,' says Kevin, 'was a particular challenge for us in terms of audio, which we felt would be very important in such a fantastic room. What we have done is to make this one zone for audio, but we've a remote control speaker switch, which allows the speakers to be selected in the different rooms, and that is all done from the touch screen.'

'We've put ceiling speakers high up in the ceiling and another set in the bathroom. We've also installed speaker terminals in front of the bed, so if the owner wants, he could also have some big floor standing speakers.'

'So depending on where he is in the master bedroom section, he can decide which speaker he wants on, meaning he can have the bedroom or the bathroom or the mezzanine on together or separately. We've also made sure that the bass, treble and balance are all controlled from here as well - something you can't always do because not all multi-room systems allow it.

Every system, as all CEDIA installers tell you, is different. And it was in the kitchen of this extraordinary apartment that I noticed what seemed at first to be an oddity.

Music while you cook, in-ceiling loudspeakers

Although the kitchen has everything from electric blinds to a plasma screen, sophisticated lighting controls and data sockets galore, it seemed to be lacking that most basic of intelligent home must-haves: a clock.

A mistake? Possibly not, suggests Kevin, indicating out of the window to a decidedly non-integrated but nonetheless highly functional kitchen clock, visible from every part of the kitchen by day or night.

You may not quite stretch to a £3.75m Thames-side penthouse yourself, but you may well know this clock. It also has a bell in it called "Big Ben".

Jonathan Margolis is a freelance journalist for national papers such as the FT, Mirror etc.

www.cedia.co.uk
www.edgesmarthomes.co.uk